This was an unexpectedly entertaining page-turner, though towards the end, so many plot twists are woven together in an improbable climax and epilogueThis was an unexpectedly entertaining page-turner, though towards the end, so many plot twists are woven together in an improbable climax and epilogue that my suspension of disbelief was tested a bit. However, getting there was fun in this combination courtroom drama and suspense thriller.

Paul Copeland survived a summer camp massacre as a teenager. He and his girlfriend snuck off into the woods for a little nookie, only to hear the screams of three other kids — including Paul's sister — being murdered. Years later, they are sure that they know who the killer is, as a creepy teenager who was also at the camp turned out to be a serial killer who was convicted for similar crimes elsewhere. The fact that Paul's sister's body was never found means he has never really had closure, but as an adult, he's now a New Jersey county prosecutor, buddies with the Governor, and he has political ambitions.

Things start unraveling when he begins prosecuting a Law & Order-style "ripped from the headlines" case: Chamique Johnson, a poor black underage stripper/prostitute, has accused a couple of rich white frat boys of raping her in their frat house. Their families start going after everyone involved in the prosecution, including Paul, to pressure him to drop the case. For Paul, this means digging into his past and uncovering some of the questions left unanswered when his sister disappeared into the woods twenty years ago.

There are a lot of characters, a lot of twists, and a lot of revelations. From Paul reconnecting with his old girlfriend, to his ex-KGB uncle, to his interview with his old camp buddy-turned-serial killer, to the super-hottie private detectives sent out to dig up dirt, there's lots of plot and it never slows down.

I had a little trouble believing the ending, and Paul was just little bit too much a combination of Perry Mason and Jack McCoy, but it was refreshing to have an imperfect but not crooked protagonist who prevails largely by not being intimidated, seduced, or corrupted. I liked it enough to try Harlan Coben again....more

This is another one of those depressing books that catalogs in grim detail just how badly humans are screwing up the environment, on a cataclysmic sca

This is another one of those depressing books that catalogs in grim detail just how badly humans are screwing up the environment, on a cataclysmic scale, how greed, desperation, and short-sightedness have destroyed entire ecosystems, devastated nations, and displaced millions, and how even though we have the scientific and technological know-how to do better, we're not going to, because short-term thinking always wins.

Oh, the author ends with an optimistic chapter, as all these books do, detailing bold and forward-thinking news plans from economists and water engineers and politicians and scientists around the world — all the ways in which we could save the water tables, grow crops more efficiently with more "crop per drop," irrigate more cheaply, supply urban populations more sustainably, etc.

But that's after chapter after chapter detailing such disasters as the Aral Sea, which the Soviets basically destroyed and which the current government is continuing to destroy, and the Salton Sea in California, created by a mistake and now allowed to become a festering, drying blister in the Sonora desert, and the Dead Sea, which is receding visibly every year. Worse, though, are the water tables. These are the underground reservoirs of water which, unlike rivers, are non-renewable. Much like oil, once you tap them dry, they're gone (and they also destabilize the surrounding earth, leading to erosion and possibly even earthquakes), and farmers and cities around the world, from the American west to India, are tapping them at an alarming rate. Everyone knows that wells used to hit water at 200 feet and now have to go 1500 feet or more, but this doesn't stop everyone from trying to get the last drop.

It is the Tragedy of the Commons on a regional scale. As many of the farmers Fred Pierce interviews point out: "If everyone stopped using the water, that would be great, but if only we do, it won't make a difference, except that our family will starve."

When the Rivers Run Dry is a bit of travel journalism that covers nearly every continent. India and China and their respective mistreatment of the Ganges, the Indus, the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers are all covered, as is the madness that is Los Angeles and Las Vegas, currently draining the Colorado River dry and casting thirsty eyes thousands of miles north to the Great Lakes.

While America's water woes are certainly serious (at least in the west), the most tragic regions of the world are, predictably, the places where government policy is completely disconnected from local resource management, or where politics and war mix violently with water rights. China and the former Soviet Union have literally killed millions in man-made floods. The author's visit to the region around the Aral Sea was particularly depressing, as he describes a stunted, poisoned land where the people have no jobs, no hope, and no future. Then there is the Middle East, where Palestinians go thirsty in sight of Israeli swimming pools.

While there are some compelling stories in here, and enough facts and history to make you think, When the Rivers Run Dry was... well, a bit dry. Fred Pierce has been to many places and talked to many people, and what he's produced is a global atlas of water mismanagement, wrapped up in the end with a few cheery programs that might solve a few of them, and some suggestions that no one is really going to heed. He questions the wisdom of dam-building, says that cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas need to be more conservation-minded, and that farmers worldwide need to use more water-efficient irrigation methods.

I almost lowered this novella to 3 stars because I found the protagonist, David Draper, so damned annoying I wanted to smack him.

Another one of the CoI almost lowered this novella to 3 stars because I found the protagonist, David Draper, so damned annoying I wanted to smack him.

Another one of the Corey writing duo's "filler" novellas set in between their Expanse novels, this one takes place on Mars shortly after Caliban's War. David Draper is the nephew of Marine Gunnery Sergeant Bobby Draper, one of the main characters in the aforementioned novel. She plays only a small (but significant) part in this novella.

David is a promising and gifted young chemistry student on Mars, with demanding parents who have high expectations for him. In a scheme that is half rebelliousness and half path-of-least-resistance spinelessness, David has become a "cook" for a local drug dealer. I wouldn't be the first reviewer to call Gods of Risk "Breaking Bad on Mars."

The plot pinch comes when David finds out his "friend" LeeLee is in trouble, and he decides he wants to save her. The annoying part comes when we realize that David is every stereotypical nerdy "Nice Guy" chump ever, fantasizing about how a grateful Leelee will reward him for his white knight heroism with kisses and maybe even letting him touch her boobies... Since Leelee is in fact a whore in debt to a drug dealer, this is obviously not going to have the happy ending David is hoping for, but for a smart kid, he sure is dumb.

Despite the main character's painful lack of self-awareness or worldliness, this is a good story that really doesn't have much to do with the central events of the Expanse series; although they are mentioned, this is just a bit of filler material....more

This prequel to James S.A. Corey's Expanse series, starting with Leviathan Wakes, tells the story of Amos Burton, whom we first met aboard the RocinanThis prequel to James S.A. Corey's Expanse series, starting with Leviathan Wakes, tells the story of Amos Burton, whom we first met aboard the Rocinante as the cheerful, casually violent engineer. As a novella providing "filler" material for the series, it's only interesting if you already like the series and want to know more about the characters.

Amos, when we are first introduced to him, turns out to be an evil and amoral crime lord in future Baltimore. While the reader might be thrown by this man who seems to bear little resemblance to the character we know, the "twist" ending is soon telegraphed as we're introduced to two characters under Amos's employ, Timmy and Eric, who are both caught up in the "churn" of one of the city's intermittent crack-downs on organized crime.

Since The Churn takes place entirely on the ground, it's really more of a crime thriller than a space opera, with the technology of space exploration rarely intruding into the lives of the people trying to survive the mean streets of Charm City. (I was disappointed that the audiobook narrator did not even attempt a "Bal-mor" accent.) It's a decent story with action and violence, but only barely science fiction. Recommended for those who like The Wireand the Expanse series....more

Is whispering nothing? Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses? Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career Of laughter with a sigh?—a note infal

Is whispering nothing? Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses? Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career Of laughter with a sigh?—a note infallible Of breaking honesty;—horsing foot on foot? Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift; Hours, minutes; noon, midnight? and all eyes Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only, That would unseen be wicked?—is this nothing? Why, then the world and all that's in't is nothing; The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia nothing; My is nothing; nor nothing have these nothings, If this be nothing.

I can see why this play is called "complex" and "problematic." The tone shifts completely from the first act to the last. It begins as a tragedy in which King Leontes becomes irrationally convinced that his wife, Hermione, has been committing adultery with his best friend, the King of Bohemia, and that her child is that of Polixenes. This leads to a lot of death and misery, which makes the final act, in which everyone is reconciled, a miracle occurs, and the play ends with a Happy Ever After more typical of Shakespeare's more straightforward comedies, almost dissonant.

That and the fact that it has few of Shakespeare's famous quotable lines is probably the reason why it's one of his less frequently performed plays, but I think it's a great and twisty tale, and if the ending was a bit deux ex machina, it's still rich in humor and tragedy, and well worth listening to.

Well, technically I probably haven't satisfied the requirements of a true purist, as I haven't read her juvenilia,I have completed the Austen oeuvre!

Well, technically I probably haven't satisfied the requirements of a true purist, as I haven't read her juvenilia, such as Lady Susan, or the unfinished Sanditon. But when I began my Austen journey some years ago by reading Pride and Prejudice and being surprised to find that it was good, I resolved that I would read the rest of her works.

Jane Austen wrote six novels - in rough order of publication: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey.

So anyway, I can now rank them in order of my favorites:

David's totally personal and unanalytical list of Austen novels in order of preference:

I'm going to say up front that I was feeling a little guilty that Sense and Sensibility ranked so low, until I realized that it was in fact her first published novel. (Though Northanger Abbey was actually written first, but only published posthumously.)

Elinor Dashwood is "sense" — the sensible, even-tempered sister who is mindful of propriety and the necessities of life. Marianne Dashwood, the younger sister, is "sensibility," which in the Austenian sense means something more like "sensitivity" — Marianne is the passionate, feeling sister who wears her heart on her sleeve.

"Nay, Mama, if he is not to be animated by Cowper!—but we must allow for difference of taste. Elinor has not my feelings, and therefore she may overlook it, and be happy with him. But it would have broke MY heart, had I loved him, to hear him read with so little sensibility. Mama, the more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much! He must have all Edward's virtues, and his person and manners must ornament his goodness with every possible charm."

(There's a third Dashwood sister, Margaret, but she's thirteen and barely enters the plot.)

We can see here the "formula" Austen was working on. Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion... each book examines a particular set of character traits and their effects on the person marked by them. (Her other books did the same thing, if not in the titles.) Elinor is the protagonist of Sense and Sensibility; she initially falls for a man named Edward Ferrars, the eldest son of a rich family, whose problem is that he wants to become a humble clergyman while his mother, who controls the family fortune, has great ambitions for him and certainly doesn't want to see him marrying some poor girl from an impoverished no-account family of minor gentry. (Shades of Lady Catherine from Pride and Prejudice.)

Marianne, meanwhile, falls for the rake who always wreaks romantic havoc in Austen novels. In this one, his name is Mr. Willoughby. Initially set up as a true scoundrel who leads Marianne on, even forms an "attachment" to her (i.e., an engagement in all but name), only to later break it (which in Regency times was a very grave moral offense if not a legal one), and then turns out to have left one of his other conquests ruined and with child. Austen does a clever job of making Willoughby out to be a villain, only to somewhat redeem him later by revealing that, while he is no saint, his conduct wasn't quite as bad as it appeared to the uninformed Dashwood sisters.

Waiting in the wings is the other Austen prototype, Colonel Brandon, the very serious old bachelor who'd be a fine catch for the right girl who doesn't mind marrying someone twenty years her senior. (Colonel Brandon is unmarried and in his early thirties — for a woman that would be beyond hope, and even for a man, in Regency times, that was getting well past prime marrying years.)

I have heard some people say that if you've read one Austen novel, you've read them all. I can see that viewpoint — Austen always chose the same general setting: "Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on." Her comedies of manners have very similar character archetypes in each, and of course, you can read every Austen novel with the assurance that the heroine will get her HEA in the end.

In that review, I argued against this viewpoint, but with Sense and Sensibility, I'm afraid too much felt too similar, even some of the exact same plot twists and lines of dialog. As this was the earlier novel, this indicates, of course, that Austen was refining her tools, which she employed with greater effect in later novels. But having read them somewhat out of order, Sense and Sensibility did suffer a bit from being yet another story about two sisters with contrasting temperaments, living in reduced circumstances thanks to the ungenerosity of their more affluent relatives, facing spinsterhood due to their lack of prospects before happy engagements with men who fortuitously turn out to be well-heeled, not without first surmounting a number of misunderstandings and existing engagements as obstacles.

Did I enjoy this book? Yes, certainly. Every Austen is worth reading. But I finished it for completeness' sake. I would recommend that everyone read something by Austen, and if you like the first one, read some more. But I don't think anyone but the true Austen fan needs to read all of her works, and I'd really only recommend Sense and Sensibility as either your first Austen (in which case all the tropes and devices will be fresh, and you'll see them used more skillfully in later books) or if you are a true fan wanting to read her complete works.

A very regretful 3 stars, but consider this a statement that even after five books, a sixth Austen was still pretty good....more

Bob is a hacker who accidentally came to the attention of a super-super-no-for-real-secret British agency known as the Laundry, and was recruited intoBob is a hacker who accidentally came to the attention of a super-super-no-for-real-secret British agency known as the Laundry, and was recruited into an intelligence agency that literally makes you sign your oath of secrecy in blood. The Laundry is dedicated to saving the world one day at a time from eldritch horrors who threaten to blot out the sun, and also to maintaining Total Quality Management and keeping Parliament from cutting back on their office supply budget. In other words, it's meant to be wacky Call of Cthulhu adventures as undertaken by Chuck. No sooner does he get back from a mission to Pluto to stop undead Nazis from summoning a Great Old One than Bob has to explain to his bureaucratic tyrant of supervisor why he didn't file a request for comp time when he didn't show up the next day during core office hours.

I liked this book better than Stross's space operas, though it did not have quite the genius of Accelerando. But it's a sort of weak Stephenson, the satire more reminiscent of Dilbert and User Friendly comic strips than the biting inventiveness that marks really good satire. I found it funny because I got a lot of the jokes which many readers will not, as they lean heavily into fairly esoteric computer science references, plus being an (ahem) civil servant myself, I know a bit about the spook shops that Stross is satirizing.

I don't think you need to be a CS geek or a federal employee to enjoy The Atrocity Archives. You do need to have some appreciation for British humor and Lovecraft, though. I enjoyed Stross's sharp skewering of government work (and yeah, I can totally believe that even a super-secret super-elite agency that literally saves the world on a routine basis still would not be exempted from bureaucratic and regulatory idiocy), but Bob himself was the sort of gormless Everyman character so popular in British urban fantasy (think Neil Gaiman) and on TV, who manages to execute very clever tricks to save the day and somehow manages to wind up with girls several orders of magnitude out of his league, and seems to be a wish fulfillment character for his nerd audience.

Fun, light, somewhat clever, would read more Laundry novels, but it's the kind of clever that can get old quickly if the author gives in to the tendency to let cleverness substitute for plotting and character development....more

My image of Puck will always be distorted by his appearance in Neil Gaiman's Sandman, but I do love this play, possibly my favorite Shakespeare. (Not

My image of Puck will always be distorted by his appearance in Neil Gaiman's Sandman, but I do love this play, possibly my favorite Shakespeare. (Not that I have seen every one by a long shot.)

The plot is simple: two pairs of lovers are tangled up because Boy A and Girl B are in love, but Boy C loves Girl B and Girl D loves Boy C, so even though Girl B and Girl D are friends, Girl D sells them both out to Boy C so he can go kill Boy A...

"O, when she's angry, she is keen and shrewd! She was a vixen when she went to school; And though she be but little, she is fierce.”

Shakespeare makes it a lot less complicated, really. So the lovers and erstwhile lovers run off into the woods, where they happen upon Oberon, the King of Faeries, who between trying to get back at his wife Titania for not doing what he wants, decides to "fix" things for the poor mortal lovers. But he sends Puck, who "accidentally" (hah hah, sure it was accidental, you "merry wanderer of the night") charms the wrong boy to be in love with the wrong girl.

He also makes Titania fall in love with an oafish would-be-actor whom he has bestowed with the head of an ass.

This is a comedy that is funny and easily apprehensible even to modern audiences. Unlike his more serious plays, there is no tragedy here and no profound message, just an Elizabethan fairy court and a band of bumpkin performers trying, ineptly, to entertain a gracious and tolerant nobleman, with the romance of the young couples being just a plot device to drive the action. Shakespeare dealt with them much more generously than with poor Romeo and Juliet....more

The Dreaming Void is the start of a new trilogy that takes place in the same universe as Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained, but thousands of years laThe Dreaming Void is the start of a new trilogy that takes place in the same universe as Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained, but thousands of years later. Like those books, it's a huge, epic space opera full of powerful aliens, amazing tech, and galaxy-threatening perils, and like those books, I found it packed with Big Ideas and should-have-been intriguing characters that never really thrilled me.

Given my similarly lukewarm feelings about Iain Banks, Alastair Reynolds, and Charles Stross, I am starting to think that British SF just doesn't do it for me.

In The Dreaming Void, there are numerous factions at work in the human Commonwealth, centuries after the great war with the alien Primes that almost wiped it out. It's governed by a sort of collective AI/post-human network known as the Advanced Neural Activity, while humans are somewhat divided in how trans-human/post-human/enhanced/immortal they want to be.

At the center of the conflict in the story is the Void, sitting at the center of the galaxy and swallowing stars at a sedate-by-human standards pace, but rapidly enough to significantly shorten the galaxy's lifespan on a cosmic scale. While the Void is kind of like a black hole in that nothing that enters it can escape, humans have apparently disappeared into the Void before and supposedly, according to dreams shared by a messianic figure named Inigo, survived there. Then Inigo disappears, and his billions of followers undertake a pilgrimage to the Void. This upsets a number of alien races, including the Raiel, who believe that messing with the Void could cause it to enter an "expansion" phase in which it begins growing and swallowing up the galaxy at a dramatically faster pace.

There are a lot of characters all engaged in separate subplots, not all of whom seem to bear directly on the central threat. While you don't need to have read Pandora's Star or Judas Unchained first, there are many references to events in that book, and several returning characters. (Humans, thanks to uploads, rejuvenations, and stasis fields, can now have lifespans measured in centuries or even millenia.) In particular the return of the Javert-like Paula Myo will no doubt be greeted with applause by fans of the first two books, and the constant references to Ozzie Isaacs suggest he's almost certain to appear again, probably at the series climax. But there's also a subplot about a young ex-waitress named Amarinta and her many love affairs, in which Hamilton carries on that fine sci-fi tradition of trying to write imaginative sci-fi sex and just making me want to skip ahead to the intrigue and the aliens.

Running through the book are Inigo's dream chapters, which are the saga of a young man named Edeard on a barely-post-medieval world within the Void. It is implied that these people are descendants of the human explorers who first entered the Void, but Edeard's story reads more like a traditional epic fantasy, in which psychic powers replace magic, and Edeard is of course the Chosen One. Despite realizing at an early age that he is far more powerful than all the other telepathic and telekinetic humans on his world, he watches his village get wiped out by bandits, then travels to the big city and becomes a member of the constabulary, where naturally he learns that everything is corrupt and he can't really make a difference — until he unleashes his spectacular abilities.

Oddly, despite reading like fantasy rather than SF, and taking place completely parallel to the main plot, I found Edeard's chapters the most interesting ones in the book.

There is plenty left hanging at the end of this whopper of a book, and it was just enjoyable enough for me to maybe want to continue the trilogy, but it just didn't grab me. A lot of it seems like rehashing the Pandora's Star duology. Sure, one would expect some of those events to be mentioned, but it's over a thousand years later — even in a super-technological society with functional immortals, I think Hamilton could have made the Commonwealth more different from its previous incarnation than it is. There is also a sameness to Paula Myo chasing cultists and nefarious agents around the galaxy trying to figure out which faction, human or alien, is really up to what. And while theoretically, a void at the galactic core threatening to expand and swallow the whole galaxy should feel like an existential threat, there is, at least not yet, none of the sense of impending doom we got when the Primes were on the verge of exterminating humanity in Judas Unchained.

So, this is really a 3.5 star book, but rounded upward since I probably will read the next one....more

This book has some notoriety among Heinlein's legions of critics for being a "reverse racism" story in which a group of white people (and their one blThis book has some notoriety among Heinlein's legions of critics for being a "reverse racism" story in which a group of white people (and their one black house-servant) are blasted thousands of years forward in time by a nuclear war, and find themselves in a future ruled by black overlords, served by an underclass of subservient whites.

Farnham's Freehold is actually not that bad, nor is the narrative message as ham-fisted as I expected; Heinlein was a progressive for his time, and notwithstanding all those people who claim he was a libertarian, less plausibly, a "right-winger," or absurdly, a fascist, he was clearly trying to make a positive statement about freedom, self-determinaton, and racial coexistence. The story is more complex than some of the more inflammatory reviews give it credit for — most of the characters, white and black, are decent by their own standards but flawed in various ways, and no one is made out to be inherently better or villainous by virtue of their race.

That said, it's understandable that a novel written in 1964 about blacks imposing chattel slavery and racial supremacy over whites — and literally ranching them for food — might be seen as a somewhat less than elevating contribution to the genre today.

As a story, this was okay, but not one of Heinlein's best (though certainly not his worst either). Hugh Farnham is a typical Heinleinian omni-capable Everyman, aided and assisted by a typical Heinleinian woman (hot, willing, smart and capable but knows her place and likes it) as they try to escape from the dystopian nightmare they have found themselves in. Actually, as dystopias go, none of the characters in the book are treated particularly badly, a point made repeatedly by their "Charity"/master, and refuted effectively by Farnham when he points out what the "King's Charity" really means. Like most Heinlein novels, there is food for thought here, and a decent amount of adventure, and a lot of nubile fourteen-year-old sex slaves (who the main character of course is too noble to take advantage of).

Interesting but dated, and not what I would recommend to someone new to Heinlein, but if you like his other, better works, Farnham's Freehold will probably entertain you....more

I downloaded this from Audible this morning and listened to it while shoveling snow, wishing I had a clockwork automaton to do that for me.

Philip PullI downloaded this from Audible this morning and listened to it while shoveling snow, wishing I had a clockwork automaton to do that for me.

Philip Pullman's Clockwork is a fairy tale set in Germany in (presumably) the 19th century, in a world where clockwork devices can be made so intricately precise that they can, if constructed by a particularly ingenious clockmaker, pass for little boys. There are elements of Pinocchio, Faust, and any number of Hans Christian Andersen fables in this story that actually weaves three stories together.

There is Franz, the storyteller who entertains the townspeople with fabulous and hair-raising stories, until he ends up invoking someone who shows up in the tavern while Franz is telling a tale about him.

Karl, the clockmaker's apprentice, approaching the day of the end of his apprenticeship where his great creation will emerge from the town clock tower, has a big problem: he hasn't actually created anything. So of course he is pulling his hair out and swearing he'd do anything to get out of this mess, and you know where that leads in fairy tales.

Finally, there is the story of the proud and arrogant prince and his pretty, fashionable wife, in need of an heir. When their only son dies stillborn, the prince goes looking for a replacement, and procures a clockwork boy.

Everything wraps up with the bad getting more or less what they deserved, the good living happily ever after. Pullman is a good storyteller, especially when he stays concise and doesn't drag trilogies off the rails in the final book (*cough* The Amber Spyglass *cough*). Clockwork really is just a modern fairy tale, so don't expect any brilliant subversion or some kind of steampunk twist. 3.5 stars....more

A fantastic sci-fi epic in the tradition of Simmons's Hyperion Cantos. In Ilium, as in the Hyperion books, Simmons really shows off his knowledge of cA fantastic sci-fi epic in the tradition of Simmons's Hyperion Cantos. In Ilium, as in the Hyperion books, Simmons really shows off his knowledge of classical literature. He obviously knows the Iliad and the Odyssey inside and out, but the author (through his characters) also fills this book with literary and historical references to Shakespeare, Proust, and a dozen other sources. It's ingenious and it made me to resolve to finally get around to reading the Iliad myself once I've finished this series.

Set in the 40th century, Ilium is a retelling of the Iliad. Kind of. We begin with "scholic" Thomas Hockenberry, who was an early 21st century classics professor revived by the Olympian gods in the 40th century to monitor the ongoing Trojan War — which is taking place on Mars.

"Wait, what?" you are thinking. The "gods" are creatures of super-science, using unimaginable powers of quantum manipulation and nanotechnology to take on the roles and attributes of the classical Greek deities. And not just the big names either — while all the old familiar gods like Zeus and Athena and Aphrodite of course figure heavily into the plot, Simmons, through his educated protagonist Hockenberry, encounters scores of minor named gods and heroes as well.

Just why the gods are reenacting the Iliad on a terraformed Mars is not made clear by the end of this volume, but the heroes — Achilles, Hector, Paris, Odysseus, etc — are also as epic as the gods, thanks to both nanotech enhancements and literal interbreeding between gods and mortals, just like in the myths.

Hockenberry and his fellow scholics are basically embedded journalists for the gods, but although they all know how the Iliad ends, they have been forbidden by Zeus to tell any of the other gods. The gods know that the scholics know how Homer said the story is supposed to end, but they've been forbidden to ask the scholics. So they continue playing their games with mortal lives.

And then Hockenberry is recruited by one of the gods for a clandestine mission to kill another god. And with the "magic artifacts" he's been given, he's able to change a key event. And suddenly we're not in the Iliad anymore. And Hockenberry, who's now a dead man as soon as the gods catch up to him, decides to change the story completely.

This would be a pretty awesome story all by itself, but in fact Hockenberry is only one of three main protagonists. There are two other subplots which eventually merge into the Iliad on Mars. A pair of "Moravecs" — a race of sentient robots built by post-humans before they disappeared, now living out among the moons of Jupiter — is on a mission of their own. Not having paid much attention to the inner system for generations, they discovered a lot of dangerous quantum manipulation and advanced terraforming on Mars. When they go to investigate, their ship is shot down... in orbit, by a bearded man in a chariot throwing a lightning bolt at them.

Mahnmut and Orphu, the only two survivors, try to make it across Mars, aided by mysterious "Little Green Men" who seem to be creations of neither early humans nor the gods. The two robots, whose dialog is kind of reminiscent of R2D2 and C3PO, if C3PO were a Shakespeare scholar and R2D2 were fond of Proust, add a bit of comedy relief to the story, but eventually have a role to play in the climactic confrontation between gods and mortals.

Finally, there are the last surviving humans on Earth, a tiny population of laborless dilettantes with little to do but go to parties and play musical beds. Their world has been created by the long-gone post-humans, who created teleportation networks around the world, set up a system in which all remaining humans are carefully population-controlled and do not have to work or want for anything. They are granted perfect health until their "fifth twenty," when they report for exterminationascension to the outer rings, Logan's Run-style. But as Eloi-like as the remaining human race may be (they are actually called "Eloi" by one of the old-time humans they later meet), the spark of curiosity hasn't completely died in all of them. A few set off on an unplanned adventure, and discover truths about their world... and that there are Morlocks.

Ilium is so rich in world-building and has such a tangled plot that there were occasional bits that lost me — I am still not sure of the role of Caliban, the Little Green Men are just strange, and we don't yet have an answer to the question of why super-advanced godlike beings have resurrected the entire cast of the Iliad on a terraformed Mars. But hopefully those questions will be answered in the second book, which I will be reading soon....more

So, this was okay. Nothing exceptional or memorable, pretty much the epitome of "commercial fiction." If you want an LAPD detective story, here is anSo, this was okay. Nothing exceptional or memorable, pretty much the epitome of "commercial fiction." If you want an LAPD detective story, here is an LAPD detective story.

Harry Bosch (yes, his real name is Hieronymus, his mother, who we learn later was a prostitute, liked the Dutch painter - ahaha, characterization!) is a child of institutions. He grew up in the system (see: mother, prostitute), then joined the Army and did a tour in Viet Nam as a "tunnel rat," then became a cop. But even though he got as far as homicide detective, he's "not one of the family." His superiors don't like him because he doesn't "get along to go along." He got suspended and investigated by Internal Affairs, who still doesn't like him, because he thinks he's a "one-man army."

Yeah, we've seen this character before. Connelly even lampshades it lightly with a mention that Bosch made some money when Hollywood did a TV show based on a few of his cases.

So, we've got the Cop Who Doesn't Go Along With the System, which means of course he always digs deeper when his bosses don't want him to. In this case, it's a fellow tunnel rat from his 'Nam days who turns up dead in a tunnel over the Mulholland Reservoir that brings Harry into a case that turns out to involve a bank job (digging tunnels under the bank, naturally) and skullduggery among the various species of rats who escaped Viet Nam.

The plot is well constructed enough, with a few twists that are mostly plausible, aside from some rather large coincidences. Harry is antagonized by IA, and there's an assistant police chief who is almost a parody as the representative of highly political police brass getting in the way of Harry Bosch solving crimes. He hooks up with a lady FBI agent who is integral to the plot; their one-nighter leads to expressions of as much sentiment as a flat character like Bosch can manage.

Basically, Bosch has very little personality beyond what you could summarize on an index card. This is also true of all the other characters. The Black Echo is a set of generic crime thriller archetypes going through their paces in the story. The Hollywood setting is likewise very routine, exercising every trope you expect in an LA noir story.

It was a decent listen, and I might pick up another Harry Bosch story some time when I want a relatively mindless LA cop story, but it doesn't even begin to invest me in the characters or the setting the way some other series, like say, Hillerman's did, and the writing is merely workmanlike....more

I tend to skip around a lot between series - it's rare nowadays that I go straight from one book in a series to the next. But I happened to pick up CaI tend to skip around a lot between series - it's rare nowadays that I go straight from one book in a series to the next. But I happened to pick up Caliban's War and Abaddon's Gate together during one of Audible's frequent 2-for-1 sales, and I enjoyed the second book in the Expanse series so much that I just went straight into the third.

Abaddon's Gate picked up where Caliban's War left off: the alien protomolecule has been building a massive alien ring in the outer solar system, to unknown purposes, and the fact that no one has a clue what it's doing or what the consequences of interfering with it will be does not prevent fools from rushing in. Earth and Mars are determined not to let the other be the only one to claim... whatever might be claimed, and so they have both parked fleets around the ring, studying it while watching each other warily. Meanwhile, the Outer Planets Alliance wants to flex their muscles, so they send the Behemoth — formerly the Nauvoo, a two-kilometer generation ship built by Mormons to carry mankind's first interstellar colony, the OPA salvaged it after the events of Leviathan's Wake and has now retrofitted it as a gigantic, scary battleship which is entirely for show, since if it ever fires its massive weapons, it will probably fall apart. But it looks damn impressive, so they send it out to join the posturing Earth and Martian fleets.

Three human fleets standing off against one another, all ready to shoot each other if anyone does something funny, while they try to figure out what the big alien artifact built by a species that was seeding the galaxy before Earth had finished cooling is doing. What could go wrong?

Well, for starters, you could throw Jim Holden into the situation. Holden and his ship, the Rocinante, are sent to the ring by plot contrivance, which of course puts him in the center of the action when things start happening. Holden, now famous throughout the solar system for always telling the truth no matter how many wars it starts, becomes the first witness to the alien ring's true purpose, with a little guided tour by a returning character from book one.

As with the first two books in the Expanse series, this one is told through multiple points of view. Sadly, foul-mouthed Avasarala and Martian marine Bobbie Draper are only mentioned in passing in this book; besides Holden we have "Bull," an OPA heavy made to take a subordinate position aboard the Behemoth for political reasons; Anna, a Methodist minister dragged into a ecumenical conference out there in the outer solar system, who provides a slightly more humane and ethical viewpoint than the honorable but stubborn and frequently idiotic Holden; and lastly, Clarissa Mao, sister of the girl Holden tried to save in the first book, daughter of the man Holden helped destroy in the second book, now bent on revenge. Clarissa is initially the villain of the story, determined to destroy Holden and everyone around him no matter what it takes, but as events take shape out beyond the orbit of Uranus, her perspective begins to be altered by a mutiny, an abrupt alteration in the laws of physics, and the most dangerous threat to life on Earth since a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs.

It would be too much of a spoiler to describe the ending, but let's just say the series will apparently be dramatically expanding in scope in book four.

These books are not new landmarks in science fiction literature, but they probably will take their place as modern genre classics, certainly more deserving of popularity than the many redundant military SF series I've been reading lately. While they wouldn't personally be my choice for Hugos, I wouldn't be upset to see one of the Expanse books earn a Hugo. (Leviathan Wakes was nominated but didn't get it, so the series as a whole has probably missed its shot.) Now that they are being made into a SyFy series, it's easy to see how the cinematic aspects are ramping up with each book. Book one had space zombies and a giant ship crashing into Venus, book two had space battles and alien monsters versus space marines, and Abaddon's Gate features metaphysical visitations by aliens, big dumb alien objects, rival space fleets, and a hot Asian chick doing transhuman ninja tricks, so I'm sure it will all look fabulous on cable. I hope. It's good, entertaining space opera and still intelligent enough not to insult the dedicated SF fan. I'm quite curious to see what where the series goes in book four....more

Take me out to the blackTell them I ain't coming backBurn the land and boil the seaYou can't take the sky from me

In the second book in pseudonymous

Take me out to the blackTell them I ain't coming backBurn the land and boil the seaYou can't take the sky from me

In the second book in pseudonymous authorial duo James S.A. Corey's Expanse series, the Rocinante, captained by James Holden, takes on a much stronger Firefly vibe. Holden and his crew begin the book still working for the Outer Planets Alliance, hunting pirates. The alien protomolecule that crashed into Venus last book is still doing....something down there. And a giant Polynesian space marine encounters monsters on Ganymede.

After that, the book alternates between the viewpoints of Holden, angsty idealistic captain who has a knack for getting himself twisted over moral dilemmas where the usual answer is "Shoot the bastard," Bobbie, Martian marine who increasingly finds it hard to tell what side she's on, and is happiest when the solution is "Shoot the bastard," Avasarala, a foul-mouthed grandmotherly UN official who will convince you that politicians aren't always useless, and Prax, whose quest to rescue his daughter, abducted by Evil Scientists for Evil Science, humanizes the Rocinante's political/action space shoot'em-up quest.

Basically, you have a small group of people trying to chase clues and bad guys around the solar system to stop an all-out interplanetary war from breaking out over an alien biological superweapon.

I found Caliban's War to be better than the first book, as the scope is expanded somewhat (and clearly by the end, it's going to expand a lot more) and there isn't so much time spent with "vomit zombies" in space, though the alien horror does still seem to borrow a lot from Alien and other cinematic precursors.

This is one of those books with a fairly straightforward plot that's a vehicle to say a lot of things about a lot of topics: how much of one's fate isThis is one of those books with a fairly straightforward plot that's a vehicle to say a lot of things about a lot of topics: how much of one's fate is set in childhood, parenting, relationships, the seemingly inescapable crucible of environment, class differences, the media, emotional and physical abuse, stalkers, and of course, child murderers.

The Wicked Girls is set in England, and seems to have been inspired by the murder of James Bulger, a three-year-old boy who was abducted, tortured, and murdered by a pair of ten-year-olds. In The Wicked Girls, the victim and the perpetrators are all girls, and of course, there's more to the story.

Annabel Oldacre and Jade Walker come from opposite sides of the tracks; Annabel's family is upper-class and wealthy, while the Walkers are known throughout their community as the British equivalent of trailer trash. Annabel and Jade by chance strike up a friendship one day, but by the end of the day, a little girl is dead and the two of them soon become the most notorious and hated eleven-year-olds in England.

Twenty-five years later, the two of them are both living under new identities, but under lifelong probationary conditions which include monthly check-ins, and an absolute prohibition against contacting one another ever again.

Jade is now "Kirsty," a journalist, and Annabel is "Amber," a cleaner at a seedy amusement park in a seaside resort town. This reversal in expected outcomes — the girl from the bad family is now an educated, middle-class career woman with a family, while the girl from the posh family is now a weary, friendless cleaning woman — is the first statement the book makes about how the circumstances of one's childhood do not predetermine the outcome.

It turns out that Jade, the girl without a future, was sent to a relatively progressive institution where she was actually given an education, and when she was released on parole, was able to make a life for herself. Meanwhile, Annabel, whom the media had labeled the "dominant" member of the pair, on the assumption that the rich girl must have been pure evil while one could only expect the poor girl to have a broken moral compass, spent her years in juvenile detention in a hellhole. She emerges basically broken and hopeless.

When a serial killer begins killing tourists in Amber's home town, Kirsty comes to cover the story. The two of them run into each other, recognize one another, and the secrets the two of them have kept hidden their entire lives immediately threaten to spill out, no matter how hard they try to avoid each other.

The Wicked Girls has a nicely twisting plot and a range of secondary characters, each of them bringing up other issues, from Amber's emotionally manipulative boyfriend to Kirsty's struggles to support their family with her husband "excessed" out of a job in his mid-40s, the minimum wage workers at the amusement park that Amber has been put in charge of, the abused girl she takes in only to be betrayed, and of course, the media, which just like twenty-five years ago, seizes on lurid details and interviews with unreliable people to construct a narrative that will sell papers and generate moral outrage, whether or not it actually bears any resemblance to the truth.

Watching two women whose lives were destroyed as children try to reconstruct an existence under the constant fear of discovery, even by their own families, and then see it all come unraveled once again, makes this book both a suspenseful psychological thriller and a tragedy even before the climax.

It's not quite 5 stars — while I liked the story and the characters, something about the writing just didn't grab me enough to make me love it. But this is still a pretty good "social" novel under the crime/thriller surface, and I'll look for more books by Alex Marwood....more

You'll see most reviews of this book referring to Battlestar Galactica, and it's pretty obvious why. A great big obsolete starship has been sitting arYou'll see most reviews of this book referring to Battlestar Galactica, and it's pretty obvious why. A great big obsolete starship has been sitting around collecting the dregs of the fleet, with a washed out alcoholic captain, and then suddenly aliens attack and it turns out the Ark Royal is the only ship that can fight them. Christopher Nuttall obviously really loved BSG. He also seems to really love strategic space combat games and the British Royal Navy, and really hate reporters.

There isn't much fleshed out in this future universe. All the countries of the early 21st century seem to be pretty much intact and similar in their relative power and politics in the future, even though they've all begun colonizing other planets. Humans have yet to encounter intelligent aliens. Then suddenly aliens attack a colony world and wipe it out. The alien ships are armed with plasma cannons, which the shields of all the newer starships cannot withstand, so a multinational defensive fleet is quickly wiped out.

The admiralty decides to send the 70-year-old carrier Ark Royal on a crucial mission because they hope its heavy armor plating, built for a previous era of space warfare, will do better against the alien weapons. This despite the fact that they know the captain of the Ark Royal is a drunkard.

Needless to say, the Ark Royal flies into glorious battle and kicks ass, there is much space combat, Captain Ted proves himself to be a great officer once he puts the bottle down, and also every single female officer about the Ark Royal is apparently a slut. (I don't think any woman had a scene without her breasts being described.)

Ark Royal is reasonably entertaining candy for those who like military SF. Accept the premise that starships are just like naval craft, and the British Royal Navy once again rules the wavesstars, and it's fun to visualize ship counters moving across a hex map as the battles are described. (At times, I could almost hear dice rolling.)

The writing is okay, though like a lot of self-published novels, the lack of polish is evident. Facts are repeated, heck, everything is repeated, and there are a lot of contradictory plot points. The worldbuilding is scant; just as much as is needed to put those ships counters on the map. Being a true SF fan, I don't just want starship combat, I want to know about the aliens, and by the end of this book, even though they have captured a few of them, they still know absolutely nothing about them or why they attacked.

This was not a bad book, but it didn't stand out from the many similar series. If you like space combat, and the idea of an "old school" British navy fighting aliens, or anything Battlestar Galactica-themed, you'll probably like it....more

The Lies of Locke Lamora was a fun bit of thieving and rogueing in a crapsack fantasy world. Red Seas Under Red Skies is more of the same, plus pirateThe Lies of Locke Lamora was a fun bit of thieving and rogueing in a crapsack fantasy world. Red Seas Under Red Skies is more of the same, plus pirates. I actually enjoyed it more than the first book, not necessarily because of the pirates.

Locke Lamora is a thief, the sort of thief who makes people want to play the thief class in AD&D, and then find out that even if you reach 15th level you're still not going to be able to pull off epic fantasy novel stunts. Locke prides himself on being able to steal anything from anyone, and quite often Lynch will have him pull off audacious stunts offscreen, like waltzing into a nobleman's heavily-guarded mansion and stealing a prize piece of jewelry from around his mistress's neck while they are in bed together. But the plots that drive these books are capers — as is pointed out several times, if Locke and Jean just wanted to be rich, they could make off with a nice haul and retire whenever they like. But they always have to find a big, difficult, dangerous score, preferably one that involves pissing off powerful people. Then of course in the process of setting up a long game, they end up crossing even more powerful people, get screwed over every which way, and have to pull off a spectacular triple-plus-cross to get out of it.

Following the events of book one, Locke Lamora, the Thorn of Camorr, and his bruiser best friend Jean, flee Camorr to lick their wounds. Locke goes into an alcoholic pity party while Jean starts building up a new gang of thieves in the small town they've wound up in, until in an effort to stir him from his depression, Jean provokes Locke into an overly audacious bit of thievery to demonstrate that he's still the most cunning bastard ever. This causes them to flee, and the whole subplot with Jean's little gang of teenage thieves is dropped, never to be mentioned again. I have noticed that Scott Lynch leaves lots of loose threads dangling, like the ancient race that left the Elderglass ruins, and the lost love that Locke has been moaning about for two books now. Either he's planning to wrap this all up spectacularly in a future volume, or he is just one of those authors who gets nifty ideas, doesn't know what to do with them, and forgets about them.

Lynch's plotting is great, though — grant his main characters the sort of epic talents they are credited with, and their scheming is clever and entertaining enough to allow the reader to cross that bridge suspended over disbelief.

Anyway — pirates. They don't really show up until about halfway in.

Jean and Locke travel to Tal Verrar and spend two years preparing to steal from the Sinspire, a grand casino with successively higher levels one can only ascend with a combination of wealth, status, and game play. The Sinspire's vaults are, of course, supposedly unbreachable, and the Sinspire is run by yet another evil mastermind, so that's Locke and Jean's target. In the process of planning their con, however, they come to the attention of the Archon of Tal Verrar, who is a rival of the master of the Sinspire and a politician with a problem familiar to historical monarchs — he commands Tal Verrar's army and navy, but Tal Verrar's "priori," or ruling council, controls the purse strings. He needs a threat to materialize and convince the priori to loosen up their purses. Another pirate attack like that one seven or eight years ago would do nicely. Once he gets Locke and Jean in his power, he assigns them to... go recruit a bunch of pirates and attack Tal Verrar so the Archon can defeat the pirates and have a well-funded navy again. So Locke and Jean have to satisfy both the Archon and the master of Sinspire, convincing each that they are a double-agent for them working against the other. Meanwhile they've been poisoned, the bondsmagi they pissed off in the first book are after them, the Archon's right-hand woman is actually working for some unknown third power, and that's before Locke and Jean even get out to sea and meet the pirates they have to convince to attack Tal Verrar so they can all be hunted down and killed.

Juggling so many knives, Lynch does a pretty good job of grounding them without cutting off too many fingers. The piracy was entertaining, as he introduces a single mother pirate captain and a pleasantly silly bit of seagoing tradition in this world in which ships must always sail with women officers and cats.

The world remains an almost unrelentingly dark one — some of the characters, including Locke and Jean, show streaks of nobility, and Locke in particular seems to be planning some sort of grand strike against the wantonly cruel upper classes. That said, this is a grimdark fantasy world. Casual cruelty, creative atrocities, humiliation and oppression and torture as sport, not to mention everyone being reliably treacherous at all levels, is par for the course.

Lynch follows other predictable cliches as well, like as soon as Jean and his new pirate honey exchanged "I love you"s, I knew she couldn't have been more dead if she already had a sword through her neck.

Despite following a few standard fantasy tropes, this was rollicking good fun, one of those books that is most entertaining not for the swashbuckling or the fantasy bits, but for the impossible situations the author puts the characters in, so the reader is forced to turn pages to find out "How the hell are they going to get out of this one?"

Definitely elevated my desire to read the next book in the series, though I hope Lynch is going to eventually incorporate some larger meta-plot into the story, rather than just continuing to spin yarns about ever-greater heists....more

I have been hearing about this series forever. I'm generally somewhat indifferent to military SF — spaceship battles alone are not particularly compelI have been hearing about this series forever. I'm generally somewhat indifferent to military SF — spaceship battles alone are not particularly compelling to me, unless I'm controlling the ships in a game. Much of Dauntless seems inspired by spaceship combat games, where you get to build a fleet, choose your weapons, select leaders based on their attributes, and so on.

The Alliance has been at war with the Syndics for a century now. Captain John Geary was in command during an early battle in that war. Then he went into emergency hibernation and was presumed dead; meanwhile, legends of his leadership have grown all out of proportion, so when the Alliance fleet unexpectedly finds his survival pod and revives him, much of the fleet reacts as if King Arthur has returned to save Britain.

Through a very briefly described sequence of events, Captain Geary is left in charge of the fleet while its leaders go to surrender to the Syndic forces who have just defeated them after a disastrous attack in the middle of Syndic space. Since the Syndics are cartoon sci-fi villains, they execute all the Alliance brass and then demand unconditional surrender from the fleet. Geary figures out a strategy to get away, and leads the fleet in a retreat through a series of star systems, trying to pick up supplies and fight off pursuing Syndics all the way.

Unfortunately, Captain Geary was never the epic hero his legend has become, and he soon finds that the Alliance has changed in the hundred years he was in suspended animation. Now they're more like rapacious glory hounds than a disciplined military, taking Geary's old command advice literally and out of context to mean that they should never retreat. They've also stopped following the rules of war that were observed in Geary's time, so besides convincing his new subordinates to follow orders and not just charge into battle to score as many victory points as possible, he also has to convince them that they shouldn't simply throw POWs out airlocks, or bombard civilian planets.

That's about the extent of the characterization and the plot. Captain Geary is idolized and hero-worshipped, but he also has a bunch of ship captains who think he's a relic from the wrong time. He stands for AmericanAlliance values like honor, discipline, professionalism, and civilized treatment of the enemy while his descendants have become more like barbarian warriors. There are several battles and some examples of Geary trying to show the fleet the "right" way to do things, but the book ends with the Alliance forces still being chased, deep in Syndic territory, so obviously the series will go on as long as the author can keep spinning it out.

As military SF goes, Dauntless is pretty much the arch-typical example. It's not new or brilliant, it's just a spaceship combat story written for people who like spaceship combat. I liked the story well enough and the writing served its purpose, but I'm really not drawn into the saga enough to want to continue what is already a fairly long series....more

This collection had three tales: The Telltale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Black Cat.

If you are unfamiliar with these classics, you shouldThis collection had three tales: The Telltale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Black Cat.

If you are unfamiliar with these classics, you should really read them. They are old-school horror, served chilled.

They're all creepy as hell - Poe depicted narrators going completely mad better than just about anyone else, including florid ol' Lovecraft. This would be fine listening on a dark Halloween night....more

I was a little ambivalent about trying one of these "Great Courses" on audio, especially with references to diagrams and such, but the instructor promI was a little ambivalent about trying one of these "Great Courses" on audio, especially with references to diagrams and such, but the instructor promised at the beginning that you could follow along at home without needing the pictures, and he was right, though there are points at which it might benefit a listener to pause the lecture long enough to look up the diagram if you are having trouble visualizing what he describes.

This is a course on advanced physics for people who are not physics students. All that high-level stuff like General and Special Relativity, the three fundamental forces, quantum mechanics, why nothing can go faster than light, how time dilation works, what is really going on with black holes and whether "wormholes" really exist (answer: there is currently no actual evidence of them, we just know that the math supporting the possibility of their existence works) and a dozen other topics for any long-time science fiction reader.

And that is why I downloaded this course, because I haven't had a physics class since high school, and I've had only a brief survey course on quantum mathematics, but I wanted to understand the physics behind relativistic travel and the formation of the universe and quantum theory and all that jazz well enough to feel educated when I read science fiction that tries to be "hard" (and even to have a better grounding for any SF I might write myself...).

I would say this course works very well for that purpose. The professor promises that the math is minimal, so at several points he handwaves the formulas, saying "Trust me (but go look it up if you want to really understand it)" but assures us that the concepts he explains require no more than high school algebra, for the most part, and this was also true. So this is a very "math light" physics course for non-physicists, and thus for someone who is a veteran of hard SF there won't be much here in the way of new concepts - you have probably read Heinlein's Time for the Stars in which a pair of telepathic twins conduct the famous "twin experiment" with one twin staying on Earth getting old while the other twin sets off on a journey in a spaceship traveling at near-lightspeed. And you've read lots of stories about black holes and how they "slow time" as you approach the event horizon. (Go see Interstellar - it's a fantastic movie.) And you know that pure matter-energy conversion would be a billion times more efficient than nuclear fusion, if we could do it. And you've heard of Schroedinger's Cat and how supposedly we could use paired qubits to achieve faster-than-light communication (we can't). And gravity warps time and space, and light is a particle and a wave (and in fact so is all matter, really), and Einstein refused to believe God rolled dice with the universe.

All that is covered here, and at the end of it, you'll understand it better, conceptually, but obviously this cannot replace an actual physics course and if you want to really, really understand it, you'd have to actually get deeper into the math. I now have a better understanding of what physics says about General and Special Relativity and black holes and time travel and quantum entanglement. Do I really, thoroughly understand it? You'll probably find several points Professor Wolfson covers need to sit with you awhile, and some stuff you'll really have to read more deeply to fully "get it." But you can get the gist adequately from this course.

So, this course will not work as a substitute for taking an actual physics class. It probably won't even work very well as a primer. But if you're just a layman who already has some idea of the stuff you've been reading about in science fiction but you want to know more about it, you'll find this course quite valuable, and if you actually don't know any of this stuff, it will probably blow your mind.

The lecturer builds up his topics very carefully, starting with what ancient astronomers and physicists knew, all the way back to Aristotle. There is a lot of physics history here, so you'll get your Copernicus and Galileo and Newton and Maxwell and Bohr and of course Einstein, and that part is also quite interesting, as there is just a little bit of biographical information about each person, but more importantly, what exactly they figured out and how and how it changed what was known up to that point in time.

If at first you don't succeed, get rid of the bitch and move on to the next sister.

A Kiss Before Dying is a taut little thriller about a sociopath whoIf at first you don't succeed, get rid of the bitch and move on to the next sister.

A Kiss Before Dying is a taut little thriller about a sociopath who conceives an ingenuous plan to seduce the daughter of a wealthy copper baron. Except she goes and gets pregnant before his plan can come to fruition. Since Daddy is the moralistic disinheriting type, he figures a kid before they are properly married and he's had time to work his charms and soften the old man up will just ruin everything. When he can't persuade her to get rid of it, he's left with only one option - a well-planned murder in which he manages to make it look like a suicide, and then avoid any connection between him and the dead girl.

Which allows him to move on to daughter #2.

But daughter #2 proves a little too intuitive — she starts putting clues together and realizing her sister didn't commit suicide, and wants to find out who murdered her. She figures everything out just a little too late.

And our boy, as long on audacity as he is short on scruples, decides third time's the charm: the rich industrialist had three daughters, and after all that research he did to seduce the first two, he knows the oldest sister pretty well...

As improbable as this story may sound, I couldn't really spot any plot holes. Sure, our protagonist needed a bit of luck here and there, but nothing so overwhelmingly coincidental as to be completely implausible. He's just a meticulous, cold-blooded schemer with a knack for manipulation.

A lot of people want books with "relatable" protagonists. Well, the protagonist of this book is a murderous, gold-digging sociopath. You want him to trip up and get caught, and you want his victims to get away, and at the same time, the exciting part is finding out how he's going to get away with it.

This book is dated now — it was written in 1954 and it's set in the early fifties, so the campus life described, and the so-visible class distinctions are not the same now, but that just makes this suspenseful novel a period piece as well. In fact, some of the period details are what made it interesting. For example, there is surprisingly little moralizing about the proposed abortion — she doesn't want to do it, but it seems more for emotional reasons than any real ethical or religious qualms. And it struck me that in some ways, the "boy from the wrong side of the tracks" was a thing that would be even harder to envision today — nowadays, we like to pretend that American society is less class-stratified, but that's because the rich are increasingly distant and out of sight. Working class people just don't socialize, at all, with the very wealthy, which makes it easier for us to pretend that there is no such thing as class.

Ira Levin also wrote other thrillers, like Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives, and with this pacey, suspenseful novel, it's easy to see how readily his stories became a part of pop culture. Definitely worth reading, and motivated me to read more by him someday....more

This Audible freebie is a nice way to hear the original Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. It's not a particularly thrilling fable - boys meets girl,This Audible freebie is a nice way to hear the original Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. It's not a particularly thrilling fable - boys meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back - though really, it's the girl who does the getting.

The story starts with an evil hobgoblin (also referred to as a demon) who goes to magic school (why did Rowling not find a way to hook this into her mythology?) and creates a magic mirror which shows "reality" in the harshest, ugliest way possible. It is shattered into a million pieces, and spread around the world, where it becomes smaller mirrors, spectacles, or tiny specks of glass getting caught in peoples' eyes, creating mischief and cold-hearted misunderstanding.

One such shard gets in the eye of a little boy named Kai, who then spurns his childhood sweetheart, Gerda. One day he goes wandering in the woods and is picked up by the Snow Queen. Gerda, convinced that he is not dead, goes on a quest to find him.

There are talking flowers, talking crows, and a not-really-evil witch, and of course, the Snow Queen herself.

A cute story with perhaps a few too many elements thrown in for the fantasy-minded modern reader, but it would certainly entertain children. Anderson does wrap this tale up with a rather saccharine Christian moral, but it's a story to please those in search of adventuresome girls and magical talking animals.

Now that I've read my first collection of Maupassant stories, I can say that he is indeed a great writer, though being as prolific as he apparently waNow that I've read my first collection of Maupassant stories, I can say that he is indeed a great writer, though being as prolific as he apparently was, I think you probably need to read a lot more to really be familiar with his work. He was a student of Flaubert, the French "realist" school, hence all these short stories being basically slice-of-life stories about (mostly) provincial French life. There are morals, sometimes, but rarely made explicit - in fact, often the stories just end, like one of those writing exercises in which the reader is asked to decide what happens next. The more moralistic tales among this collection include The Necklace, about a French housewife who borrows a friend's expensive diamond necklace for a ball and then loses it. The ending has the sort of twist that O. Henry later became famous imitating. Then there is Boule De Suif, about a group of wealthy French townspeople fleeing Prussian-occupied Rouen, when a Prussian officer takes a fancy to the courtesan in their midst. When she refuses his advances, her countrymen initially praise her patriotism, but when the officer refuses to let anyone travel onwards until he gets his way, they end up cajoling her into sacrificing herself, and then hypocritically turn on her.

All the other stories were likewise enjoyable and interesting, ranging from fireside tales about hunting and farming and jilted lovers and poor peasants and debauched soldiers, to a few, like The Inn, that take the form of a ghost story even if no actual supernatural apparitions appear.

Definitely worth reading these, and I wouldn't hesitate to try some more Maupassant.

The moist, lumpy earthen floor looked greasy, and, at the back of the room, the bed made an indistinct white spot. A harsh, regular noise, a difficult, hoarse, wheezing breathing, like the gurgling of water from a broken pump, came from the darkened couch where an old man, the father of the peasant woman, was dying.

An old friend, known to all of us, M. Boniface, a great sportsman and a connoisseur of wine, a man of wonderful physique, witty and gay, and endowed with an ironical and resigned philosophy, which manifested itself in caustic humor, and never in melancholy, suddenly exclaimed:

"I know a story, or rather a tragedy, which is somewhat peculiar. It is not at all like those which one hears of usually, and I have never told it, thinking that it would interest no one.

"What do you want?" he then asked her. And with clenched teeth, and trembling with anger, she replied: "I want--I want you to marry me, as you promised." But he only laughed and replied: "Oh! if a man were to marry all the girls with whom he has made a slip, he would have more than enough to do."

As he was looking for a place to climb up I showed him the easiest way, and gave him a hand. He climbed up. Then we helped up the three girls, who had now quite recovered their composure. They were charming, especially the oldest, a blonde of eighteen, fresh as a flower, and very dainty and pretty! Ah, yes! the pretty Englishwomen have indeed the look of tender sea fruit. One would have said of this one that she had just risen out of the sands and that her hair had kept their tint. They all, with their exquisite freshness, make you think of the delicate colors of pink sea-shells and of shining pearls hidden in the unknown depths of the ocean.

Sabot (Theodule), a master carpenter, represented liberal thought in Martinville. He was a tall, thin, man, with gray, cunning eyes, and thin lips, and wore his hair plastered down on his temples. When he said: "Our holy father, the pope" in a certain manner, everyone laughed. He made a point of working on Sunday during the hour of mass. He killed his pig each year on Monday in Holy Week in order to have enough black pudding to last till Easter, and when the priest passed by, he always said by way of a joke: "There goes one who has just swallowed his God off a salver."

She was one of those pretty and charming girls, born by a blunder of destiny in a family of employees. She had no dowry, no expectations, no means of being known, understood, loved, married by a man rich and distinguished; and she let them make a match for her with a little clerk in the Department of Education.

She was simple since she could not be adorned; but she was unhappy as though kept out of her own class; for women have no caste and no descent, their beauty, their grace, and their charm serving them instead of birth and fortune. Their native keenness, their instinctive elegance, their flexibility of mind, are their only hierarchy; and these make the daughters of the people the equals of the most lofty dames.

Quartermaster Varajou had obtained a week's leave to go and visit his sister, Madame Padoie. Varajou, who was in garrison at Rennes and was leading a pretty gay life, finding himself high and dry, wrote to his sister saying that he would devote a week to her. It was not that he cared particularly for Mme. Padoie, a little moralist, a devotee, and always cross; but he needed money, needed it very badly, and he remembered that, of all his relations, the Padoies were the only ones whom he had never approached on the subject.

“We were at dinner when a letter was brought in and my father opened it. You know my father, who thinks that he is king of France ad interim. I call him Don Quixote, because for twelve years he has been running a tilt against the windmill of the Republic, without quite knowing whether it was in the name of the Bourbons or of the Orleans. At present he is holding the lance in the name of the Orleans alone, because there is nobody else but them left. In any case, he thinks himself the first gentleman in France, the best known, the most influential, the head of the party; and as he is an irremovable senator, he thinks that the neighboring kings’ thrones are very insecure.

Nothing is more amusing, more delicate, more interesting than the manoeuvring of a balloon. It is an enormous toy, free and docile, which obeys with surprising sensitiveness, but it is also, and before all, the slave of the wind, which we cannot control. A pinch of sand, half a sheet of paper, one or two drops of water, the bones of a chicken which we had just eaten, thrown overboard, makes it go up quickly.

"Very few stand the test of the bath. It is there that they can be judged, from the ankle to the throat. Especially on leaving the water are the defects revealed, although water is a powerful aid to flabby skin.

"The first time that I saw this young woman in the water, I was delighted, entranced. She stood the test well. There are faces whose charms appeal to you at first glance and delight you instantly. You seem to have found the woman whom you were born to love. I had that feeling and that shock.

And soon a rumor began to circulate. People talked of a colossal wolf with gray fur, almost white, who had eaten two children, gnawed off a woman's arm, strangled all the watch dogs in the district, and even come without fear into the farmyards. The people in the houses affirmed that they had felt his breath, and that it made the flame of the lights flicker. And soon a panic ran through all the province. No one dared go out any more after nightfall. The darkness seemed haunted by the image of the beast.

He slept for a long time, for a very long time, the unconquerable sleep of exhaustion. But suddenly a voice, a cry, a name: "Ulrich," aroused him from his profound slumber, and made him sit up in bed. Had he been dreaming? Was it one of those strange appeals which cross the dreams of disquieted minds? No, he heard it still, that reverberating cry,--which had entered at his ears and remained in his brain,--thrilling him to the tips of his sinewy fingers. Certainly, somebody had cried out, and called: "Ulrich!" There was somebody there, near the house, there could be no doubt of that, and he opened the door and shouted: "Is it you, Gaspard?" with all the strength of his lungs. But there was no reply, no murmur, no groan, nothing. It was quite dark, and the snow looked wan.

For several days in succession fragments of a defeated army had passed through the town. They were mere disorganized bands, not disciplined forces. The men wore long, dirty beards and tattered uniforms; they advanced in listless fashion, without a flag, without a leader. All seemed exhausted, worn out, incapable of thought or resolve, marching onward merely by force of habit, and dropping to the ground with fatigue the moment they halted. One saw, in particular, many enlisted men, peaceful citizens, men who lived quietly on their income, bending beneath the weight of their rifles; and little active volunteers, easily frightened but full of enthusiasm, as eager to attack as they were ready to take to flight; and amid these, a sprinkling of red-breeched soldiers, the pitiful remnant of a division cut down in a great battle; somber artillerymen, side by side with nondescript foot-soldiers; and, here and there, the gleaming helmet of a heavy-footed dragoon who had difficulty in keeping up with the quicker pace of the soldiers of the line. Legions of irregulars with high-sounding names "Avengers of Defeat," "Citizens of the Tomb," "Brethren in Death"--passed in their turn, looking like banditti. Their leaders, former drapers or grain merchants, or tallow or soap chandlers--warriors by force of circumstances, officers by reason of their mustachios or their money--covered with weapons, flannel and gold lace, spoke in an impressive manner, discussed plans of campaign, and behaved as though they alone bore the fortunes of dying France on their braggart shoulders; though, in truth, they frequently were afraid of their own men--scoundrels often brave beyond measure, but pillagers and debauchees.

Damocles is not an action-packed novel. Most of the book is talking, describing the laborious task of humans and aliens trying to establish communicatDamocles is not an action-packed novel. Most of the book is talking, describing the laborious task of humans and aliens trying to establish communications when they share no culture or language in common. The linguistics are not described in detail, but the process of constructing a bridge to translation is realistic.

This is also a "humans are the aliens" novel, in which it's the Earthers who come from outer space, to the shock and awe and terror of a less advanced civilization.

The setting the Earthers come from is barely fleshed out — humans have expanded to other colonies, but the message from an older alien race giving Earthers the secret of FTL travel and telling them that there are other races seeded from the same DNA as humanity is never described in more detail than that. It's a MacGuffin to send the crew of the Damocles out into space.

Damocles is told in alternating chapters from the viewpoints of Meg Dupris, the linguist aboard the Damocles, and Loul Pell, a socially awkward nerd in a dead-end government job when the Earthers arrive.

Besides the realistic communications problems, the best part of Damocles is the realistic aliens, the Didetos. They are close enough to human that their psychology and physiology is understandable, but different enough that they're clearly not human. Their culture constantly throws the Earthers off-balance with its similarities and differences - Didetos don't sleep, and although they have an industrial society that has begun launching satellites, they have never in their history undertaken to explore their oceans. Yet, they have press conferences, a military-industrial complex, and comic book nerds.

Loul Pell is one of the latter. A disgraced scientist, now working as a cubicle drone because he once presented a paper speculating about alien contact, he suddenly finds himself whisked away by Dideto Men In Black when aliens actually appear, pretty much where and how he said they would. And so he accidentally takes the role of speaker-to-aliens, and befriends a strange, willowy, extraterrestrial named "Meg."

Although there are some misunderstandings and tension over miscommunications, and questions about whether the Earthers will be able to return home, there is no dramatic action in this book. It's a novel about inter-cultural communications, and if aliens ever do visit Earth, I can see Men In Black whisking S.G. Redling off to advise our first contact team on how to communicate with them.

A thoughtful, intelligent sci-fi novel that explores linguistics and alien cultures in a realistic way. Damocles is not a particularly exciting book, but it's a fine work of genuine speculative fiction. 3.5 stars, rounding up to 4, because I just read Fluency, which sucked, so I'm glad to see a SF novel about a linguist making contact with aliens that doesn't suck....more

This is a set of four interlinked short stories in post-zombie apocalypse Los Angeles.

The first story is about one woman, traveling alone, who is suppThis is a set of four interlinked short stories in post-zombie apocalypse Los Angeles.

The first story is about one woman, traveling alone, who is supposedly immune to the virus that creates "Junkies" (so-named because they eat literally anything they can stuff into their mouths). She acquires a traveling companion, another woman. Trouble ensues.

The second story is about a biological researcher who is brought to a research facility that is trying to develop a cure. He uncovers the Horrible Truth.

The third story is about a band of professional scavengers in the post-apocalyptic city who run into something more dangerous than Junkies.

The fourth story is about a mercenary/assassin who's still doing his thing after the apocalypse.

There is some cleverness in the way each story feeds into the next, but there is nothing really new here for zombie fans. Peter Clines's Ex-Heroes series is more interesting, as he mixes superheroes with his zombies. This is a fun, short read, but it's nothing you haven't seen before....more

A short story in the Old Man's War universe, originally a freebie on Audible. Jane Sagan, the genetically engineered supersoldier who we first met inA short story in the Old Man's War universe, originally a freebie on Audible. Jane Sagan, the genetically engineered supersoldier who we first met in Old Man's War, is the narrator of The Sagan Diary, and she refers to events in that book, so it won't make a lot of sense unless you've read OMW.

Basically, this was a literary experiment by John Scalzi, trying to write from a female POV - albeit not a normal woman. Jane is chronologically only nine years old, but she was born "adult" and is now sorting through what it means to be in love and desire a normal life. There is some musing about life and death and killing aliens and being a supergenius who has to deal with slooooooow moving and thinking and talking normal humans, and then the obligatory love and sex bits which were well written, but not as interesting as Jane talking about how she decided to become a xenoanthropologist, studying the cultures of the aliens they've been sent to exterminate.

This was an okay short story, but there's not much story to it and it doesn't expand the OMW universe much. It's a decent internal monologue of an unusual soldier, but pretty much only worth listening to if you want some OMW extras....more

This is clearly a bit of filler between trilogies, and a contrived excuse for Larry Correia to write a battle between a giant robot and Godzilla intoThis is clearly a bit of filler between trilogies, and a contrived excuse for Larry Correia to write a battle between a giant robot and Godzilla into his Grimnoir trilogy, but like the rest of his magical-superhero alternate universe stories, it's fun and action packed pulp adventure that just doesn't bear too much thinking about.

Taking place about twenty years after the end of Warbound, Tokyo Raider stars Joe Sullivan Jr., a chip off the old block. Having joined the Marines, just like that he is whisked off to Japan at the direct request of the President (who is not a historical figure but instead a familiar face from the previous books). Even though the US and the Imperium are clearly headed for war, at the moment the Imperium is at war with their mutual enemy, the USSR. Stalin's sorcerers have summoned a giant monster that's devastating Japan, and Imperium scientists and mages have built a giant robot that, conveniently, none of their own magically-gifted warriors can operate. Somehow our old friend Toru, now in charge of the Imperium, figures his old frenemy Jake's son is the man they need.

This doesn't really make sense, but like I said, it's just an excuse for a battle between a giant robot blazoned with a rising sun pumping the Star Spangled Banner from its speakers, and a Godzilla-sized demon with the Soviet hammer & sickle burned into its chest. Fix that image in your head and have fun. It does make me look forward to the next Grimnoir series....more

I found book one in the Destroyermen series to be fun and entertaining, if a bit flat and cheesy, style-wise. Book two, though, actually had me wantinI found book one in the Destroyermen series to be fun and entertaining, if a bit flat and cheesy, style-wise. Book two, though, actually had me wanting to stand up and cheer. Not that it's any less flat and cheesy, but there are some quintessential qualities that Taylor Anderson brings to this series that I've been missing in sci-fi and military fiction lately.

Duty, honor, bravery, sacrifice, and heroism. Men acting like men. (Yes, the women - both human and Lemurian - are pretty brave too.) A war that feels like a war.

This book is very similar to an old WWII movie - the ones made before we got cynical and stopped presenting Americans as the good guys. The USS Walker and its sister ship the USS Mahan have allied with the Lemurians, a civilized race descended from lemurs in the alternate Earth in which the two destroyers find themselves. They face the Grik, an almost mindlessly violent race descended from reptiles or dinosaurs. In Crusade, we learn that the Japanese battleship Amagi, which chased the two American destroyers into the storm that brought it to this world, followed them, and is now allied with the Grik.

This makes the two sides pretty starkly black and white: Americans and friendly lemur-people vs. Japanese and evil crocodile-people.

But, the Americans and Lemurians are not universally good, and the Japanese are not universally evil. There is in-fighting among the various land-dwelling and sea-going tribes of Lemurians, some of the Americans get themselves into trouble with bad behavior, while in addition to Lieutenant Shinya, the captured Japanese officer who has now become effectively a part of the Walker's crew, Anderson also writes some scenes from the point of view of the Amagi's crew, and specifically, its unfortunate executive officer. The Japanese are Imperial Japanese. They have a duty, and an enemy. But while their captain is evidently going mad, the rest of the crew is starting to have doubts about whether they'd really rather be allied to cannibalistic lizard men than Americans.

Crusade is a series of battles, political alliances, and chases, with the tension ramping up as they discover that the Grik are invading the home of the Lemurians in a massive swarm, and worse, accompanied by a Japanese battlecruiser. The climax, in which the Walker faces a vastly more powerful ship it can't possibly defeat, is worthy of the most rocking naval adventure. As they are trying to evacuate thousands of Lemurians in the face of the Grik invasion, and no matter what they do, they must cope with the inevitable losses of thousands more, the tragedy and heroism of both humans and Lemurians is rousing, inspiring, a real edge-of-your-seat adventure.

Removed from the geopolitical considerations of Earth, the Americans in this world are a little pocket of America all their own, and it's what they make of it. And so far, they are what you'd expect from a red-blooded US Navy crew - sailors, heroes, not untarnished with the occasional scoundrel, but good men worthy of respect and admiration without the author doing a lot of jingoistic chest-beating.

The technical details all seem to be authentic and well-researched, from the advantages and disadvantages of the two American "four-stackers" vs. the huge, ultra-modern Amagi (which is struggling with damage of its own and the difficulties of getting repairs and fuel from its Grik "allies") to the aerial duel between a salvaged seaplane and a Japanese spotting biplane, to problems with American torpedoes. Throw sailing ships and the Lemurians' giant seagoing "homes" into the mix, and you've got a blend of Horatio Hornblower, Battlestar Galactica, and Midway.

I'm giving this book 5 stars because it was exciting all the way through, and I was worried about the heroes at every step of the way - when the Amagi shows up, you really feel the "Oh, shit" moment as Captain Reddy realizes how badly they are screwed. This book improved the last by adding depth to Lemurian culture (including more, ah, relations between humans and Lemurians - some good, some very much not), and even a little bit to the Grik, although so far they're still pretty much just a mindless horde of barely sentient monsters led by evil overlords.

It's not literary, it's just the modern version of a pulp adventure, but damn, I like it, even if I am looking at the length of the series (9 books and counting now?) and reviews of later books in the series that seem to indicate that the author is no hurry to wrap it up....more

This short story, set after Correia's Grimnoir trilogy, was an Audible freebie, and will be quite enjoyable to anyone who enjoyed the previous GrimnoiThis short story, set after Correia's Grimnoir trilogy, was an Audible freebie, and will be quite enjoyable to anyone who enjoyed the previous Grimnoir books. Jake Sullivan is back, and by fairly arbitrary plot manipulation, he's hanging around in Casablanca doing a bad Bogie impersonation when his old "friend" Dr. Wells, the sociopathic mastermind who's now running China's organized crime syndicates, asks if Sullivan wouldn't mind hopping a ride on his expensive new zeppelin full of international high-rollers and figuring out who's brought a bomb on board before it blows up.

Sullivan agrees, with the sort of reasoning that makes sense when the GM is telling you, "Look, if you say no, we're just gonna have to play Munchkin or something tonight instead." Thus semi-railroaded into the plot, the Player Character proceeds to sniff out the villains, of whom there are plenty to choose from, since Wells's zeppelin is carrying Imperium agents, NKVD spies, a mysterious German working for a more mysterious organization which is apparently being set up as a future nemesis for the Grimnoir Society, and various other rich, powerful scoundrels.

Correia enjoys inserting historical figures into his alternate history: here, Lavrenti Beria (one of the original Soviet secret police chiefs) makes an appearance. The story is short but of course ends with a super-powered battle and hints of future conflict with the real Big Bad (or rather, the minion of the real Big Bad) getting away. Nice to see that the Grimnoir series will continue....more